Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  One day, he watched a postman seat himself at the counter and remove a newspaper from the leather satchel over his shoulder. Without taking an order, the barman withdrew a glass that he inspected for dust, then set on a coaster. Then he reached into a lowboy and reemerged with a small, bulbous jar of pear juice. Gently, he turned it upside down and back, then popped the lid. The barman held the bottle over the lowball for what felt like an hour, not a word passing between the two men. The drink stood untouched for another eternity. Then the postman brought it to his lips, took an invisible sip, and returned it to the coaster.

  My father had come from a country whose waiters and salespeople watered down sour cream and vodka, and left a pinkie on the scale when weighing out sausage, the saved amounts siphoned off for personal use or sale on the side. From a country where food was fallen upon as if it would vanish. Whereas this ordinary postman had been served like a king given his nectar, and sipped it as if he planned to be there till dinner. It didn’t escape my father that his afternoon walks were his own humble version of the same. But he didn’t dare spend the money he’d made in the market, and never ordered a juice. Perhaps it wasn’t money and he was simply shy.

  At the beach, I tried to memorize words from a Russian-to-English picture book, but it was early October, the sea was warm, and it wasn’t as if my grandfather could test me. In lieu of English, I mastered the art of lying beached on the sand, my stomach swelled with the Moscatos my grandfather had bought, nagged only slightly by the perfect grades I’d left behind for this life of leisure and sloth. To prevent random spot testing at home, I made myself scarce in the yard, collecting fallen fruit, raking leaves, and trying to ingratiate myself with the woman I loved.

  Every night, we ate turkey wings. We’d never seen turkey, but the wings were in every market here, larger than chicken wings, tender, and cheap. We called them Soviet Wings, after the soccer team once managed by Stalin’s son Vasily. (By persuasion or worse, he induced players from other clubs to defect until he had a unit of all-stars.) They got braised with onion, carrot, and tomatoes. They flavored soups. They sat astride swirls of mashed potato like slingshots. The Italians ate indoors, but the Soviets always went outside. You knew dinnertime in Ladispoli because suddenly hundreds of windows flew open, Adriano Celentano or Toto Cutugno crooning from stereos set on the sills. The Russians sang along, though they hardly knew what they were saying.

  Buongiorno Italia con i tuoi artisti

  Con troppa America sui manifesti

  (Good morning, Italy, with your artists

  With too much America on the posters.)

  “Soviet Wings” Braised in Caramelized Onion, Carrot, and Tomatoes

  Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

  Serves: 2

  2 turkey wings, about 3/4 pound each

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  9 garlic cloves, divided (3 put through a garlic press, 3 chopped, 3 halved)

  2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons olive oil

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 large carrot, grated

  4–5 vine-ripened tomatoes, or 3 meaty, ripe, juicy beefsteaks, chopped

  1 tablespoon tomato paste

  2 bay leaves

  Rinse the turkey wings and pat dry. If you wish, using a sharp knife, cut off the wing tips so they fit better in the pan. Season generously with salt and pepper.

  In a small bowl, combine the pressed garlic and 2 teaspoons of the olive oil. Rub onto the wings and set aside.

  In a large, heavy pot, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Salt to taste. Add the carrot and cook for 5 minutes, until softened. Add the chopped garlic and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds.

  Add the chopped tomatoes to the pot and salt to taste. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and let cook for 5 minutes, so the tomatoes can start to throw off their liquid.

  Add the remaining halved garlic to the pot along with the tomato paste, bay leaves, and 2 cups of water. Salt to taste. Add the wings, nestling them into the liquid.

  Cook at a gentle simmer, uncovered, for about 30 minutes, turning the wings every 10 minutes. You may wish to poke some holes in the turkey skin and meat with a thin, sharp knife so the flavor soaks in.

  Serve over your favorite grain to soak up the broth.

  One night, we arrived at the fountain to discover a larger commotion than usual. Someone had been turned away. Turned away? From where? America, where, came the answer. That evening’s sages were proclaiming the latest—if you had higher academic degrees, that made you less rather than more desirable; the Americans wanted only those who could prove discrimination, and if you worked in some physics institute, what kind of sufferer were you? Those who’d joined the Communist Party, even for practical reasons, would also have problems, as would criminals, the seriously sick, and the mentally ill. “Who’s sane, coming out of that place?” someone said, and the crowd huffed, but we were trying to cheer ourselves up: How many of the men present had feigned “fainting spells and periodic lost consciousness” on their physicals to avoid serving in the Red Army, where you were lucky to come out of hazing alive even if you weren’t a Jew? The Americans had computers. They knew everything.

  “Beware the female consul!” the speaker bellowed over the racket. “They’ve turned away seven families!” At these words, the crowd fell silent. A single rejection could be dismissed as anomaly—but seven? That couldn’t be true. The man was bluffing to keep their attention. Sometimes our people, really. Bragging because they’re in and you’re not. Seven families! If so, what do they have us here for? What, they’ll leave us in Italy? Come on, don’t be ridiculous. In our family, there was only one advanced degree, and a membership in the Young Communist League, not the party itself. Surely we were in the clear.

  Italy took longer than Austria, so the art historians among the émigrés organized tours. Sixty dollars to go north and forty dollars to go south—transportation, lodging, meals, and tours included. At the Uffizi, my parents stood next to a Soviet couple who had emigrated to America eight years before. They were wounded by the nothing price my parents had paid for their trip; they’d paid thousands of dollars. However, the man said, “I can buy this painting right now. Seventy thousand dollars? Easy.” The Soviet ability to mourn having spent more than another—while brandishing wealth—had survived their years in America.

  It was in the Piazza San Marco that, for the first time, my mother felt her dolor about leaving lift slightly. It had persisted for so long that she wondered whether it was a sentence for all time, at least for emotional people like her—clearly her husband felt the opposite. At first, she hoped her mother’s louder sorrow would make her own subside, but the only thing that subsided was the right she felt to not conceal it. Until the sight of the piazza tipped the last month’s accumulation of beauty, leisure, and free conduct over some edge and made her weep, the way you break out in laughter after a chronic pain finally leaves.

  To celebrate, they tried pizza. They’d tried it before leaving Minsk, where a pizzeria had just opened, but for those pizzaioli, it was a cake of fried dough baked with cheese and tomatoes. This was different. They were given knife and fork. Then they were gouged at the till. But they were light-headed from the indulgence. Then they tried espresso. They took it, strong as narcotic, with their elbows on the copper counter just like the Italians, and became even more light-headed. Then a second—he with tiramisu, she with fruit conserves plumped with whipped cream. Then a third. They couldn’t sleep that night, but they didn’t mind. The next day, they shelled out another irresponsible cluster of lira for a gondola ride. Gondoliers charged per ride, not per passenger, so a Soviet immigrant joke, circa 1988: How do you know where the people in that gondola come from? If it’s two, they’re American or Japanese. If it’s ten, they’re ours.

  My parents would come to regret the money they’d spent so freely up north—even in Italy, it turned out, y
ou couldn’t relax without paying a price. They returned to a Ladispoli changed. The news of the seven families had been true. More rejections had come through, families bewildered amid rumors that stipends would end. One older man, inadequately shielded by his stunned children, suffered a terminal heart attack; a funeral cortege took him to a cemetery with spare plots. The word refusenik took on a new meaning.

  The Soviet Union was liberalizing—the Americans weren’t as keen to take in economically rather than politically repressed immigrants; neither were American Jews to agitate on behalf of people who celebrated Passover with pork. Israel would take them, but to go to Israel “and fight Arabs in the desert” was as conceivable as a Jew in charge of the USSR. Our elders had saved us from the Red Army so we could join Israel’s? Meanwhile, over phone lines full of static, we heard about Azerbaijanis and Armenians locked in slaughter, rumors of a pogrom in Kharkov. Who knew what was true—every mouth embellished in proportion to the anxiety of its owner. But this was the Soviet Union the Americans thought was free of oppression?

  The fountain was never the same. It was as if people stayed away from each other to avoid being hexed. You no longer saw as many dinner tables outside, and suddenly the Italians’ music was irritating and frivolous. What had seemed like a blessed bit of hooky for the children came to seem like an indefinite future without schooling. It remained illegal to seek employment as long as the stipends came in, but how much could you count on these stipends if you couldn’t count on any of it? People quietly signed up for house-painting crews, or to attend at gas stations. They worked with the fear and fury of people who had allowed themselves to believe—of people violently returned to the feeling that they had only themselves and their loved ones to trust. Impressed, their Italian employers asked if they’d considered another option: Italy. They’d hire them formally, full-time, with benefits. But the immigrants couldn’t imagine they would be made to remain. Have you lived badly here? they were asked. You’re in Europe, in the most beautiful country on earth. What do you think waits for you over there?

  Meanwhile, the older people kept dying. By the time we were summoned for our interview in mid-November, an entire corner of the cemetery had been given over to i russi.

  In preparation, my mother wrote out scripts. My grandmother would talk about the Minsk ghetto, surviving on potato peels in the swamps, returning to orphanhood. My grandfather would talk about anti-Semitic slurs in the navy, at work, on the street. Dispensing with concerns about what I would overhear, my mother made him rehearse, so that the villa rang with the strange sound of a Jewish man calling out the vilest anti-Semitic calumny. My grandfather kept trying to elaborate by describing how he had avenged his honor—a knee to the kidneys; a dumbbell to the jaw—and my mother kept yelling at him to keep quiet so he could cut a more pitiful picture.

  No one slept the night before. In the general anxiety, we forgot to plan what to wear. Something dignified enough to make us seem worthy of America, but not so dignified that we seemed to have been doing fine in the Soviet Union. The hour of the Rome train approaching, bodies blearily wandered from room to room, holding up various outfits. Neither my grandfather nor my father enjoyed dressing himself on a regular day, and my grandmother remained a shadow of her stentorian self, so my mother cut the air with her hand and said, “Enough! Wear what you wore to the concert in Vienna.” And so we went to meet the consul dressed like evening revelers. I was tucked into slacks and a brown Lithuanian velour sweater bisected by a leather black stripe—the very picture of need or prosperity, depending on whom you asked.

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Maybe the fact that when we walked in, we saw the very person we’d prayed we would not: the female consul. (No one had mentioned her attractiveness: It didn’t agree with the picture in our minds.) My grandmother began talking about the war and then started weeping softly. Instead of focusing on his slights, my grandfather couldn’t help pointing out, after all, about how he gave as good as he got. My father stumbled, too. Even I could see they were failing. The questions kept coming, businesslike—free of hostility, pity, and empathy all—but the consular officer was writing down less after the translator translated.

  My mother tried to even the score. In a torrent, she let forth everything everyone had forgotten to say. “My parents are elderly—they’re frightened and nervous,” she said, and burst into tears. A long, crinkling silence followed, the consul watching inscrutably. Then she turned toward the window, where I sat slightly apart as if my fate were not interlinked with the others’. The translator conveyed her words: “And what about you? You’re not such a young boy anymore. Did you know you were Jewish in the Soviet Union?” My mother quit crying and stared at me. She looked stricken with terror. A script for me she hadn’t considered.

  I leaned forward, placed my elbows on my knees and my palms on my temples. Then I slapped one of the temples. “They threw rocks at my head,” I said.

  “Who did?” the translator blurted out without waiting for the consul.

  “The other children,” I said. “They called me a kike and threw rocks at my head.”

  “Did you tell the teacher?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “What can I say?” I shrugged theatrically. “The teacher was silent.”

  The consul’s brows opened and she leaned back in her chair. Her gaze remained unfathomable, but in a different way than before.

  On the train home, we were silent. I burned with shame at having said what I’d said about my beloved teacher, the friends who wouldn’t have dared throw an acorn at my head. I was the one who punched them in the stomach! Where did those words come from? I hadn’t lied once in my life, certain my parents would see it blazing out of me like a poisonous light. I wanted the adults to explain what had happened, but for once, they seemed to have forgotten me. Perhaps a lie was all right if you did it on behalf of your family. If you learned it from them. Maybe that’s what they were thinking about.

  Returning to the villa, we ran into another émigré. “Who did you get?” he asked. “The woman consul,” we said glumly. He whistled. “You’re done for,” he said, and went on his way.

  Worse, the interview took place on a Thursday—we’d have to wait till Tuesday for the next synagogue readout of who’d made it. My grandmother went directly to bed. My mother followed. They lay next to each other in silence. My grandfather sat at the dining table, issuing monologues to no one about why he’d said what he’d said. Only my father remained standing. He left, returning a half hour later with a small bag. Soon there were five plates of pasta with olive oil, garlic, and lemon on the dining room table, a single piece of shrimp atop each. The women descended like zombies, protesting no appetite but saying they’d sit “for the company.” But they ate. No one spoke except my grandmother, who reprimanded my father for spending money on shrimp.

  “It was a gift,” my father said. “He was closing.”

  “I didn’t know you could cook,” she said, not clear whether it was a compliment.

  “You never let me near the stove.” Ditto.

  The next day, he took me along. The sun was cold, leaves rustling the pavement. “Zuppa,” the grocery man called out—he understood my father was looking for bargains—filling our sack with day-old bread, cannellini beans, a sack of aged vegetables, and a meatless ham hock he went across the street to ask the butcher to give us for free. My father boiled the hock until the water turned cloudy, periodically skimming fat from the top. Then the vegetables went in, from hardest to softest. The beans toward the end. Once it was ready, he ladled it over the bread.

  “But the bread’s already in the soup,” my grandfather objected. He’d never eaten bread other than out of his left hand while the right forked the food.

  “Try it,” my father said. The soup bowls were emptied. The next day, my father made sardines with garlic, white wine, and mint, the lattermost pushed on him by the grocer. No one touched the mint, but the sardines went
down heads and all.

  By Tuesday morning, my mother was beyond reason. The villa having no phone, she went to the phone booth down the street and dialed the HIAS office in Rome. The phone was answered by an Italian employee who’d managed to learn enough Russian. “If you don’t tell me the decision,” my mother said evenly, “first my mother will die of a heart attack and then my father will die of a heart attack. I know you’re not supposed to—but they’ll die.” After taking surnames, the Italian put the phone down. When she returned, she said, “Sì, signora.” My mother stiffened for the verdict, but she’d misunderstood. That was the verdict: Sì. When she came home, she burst into tears, misleading everyone. Then: shouting, embraces.

  Only I wasn’t happy. Feeling like a traitor, I slipped out to the yard and began crying. Then I grabbed the rake and started scratching the lawn. The fruit had finished weeks before, but the leaves kept coming. Whimpering, I raised three piles as if I were going to build a leaf man, only how could it hold? I heard the tap of heels on cobblestone and saw Signora Limona, one finger keeping her place in Ladispoli Oggi. She said something in Italian, of which I understood only the last word, bambino, but I knew she was asking why I was crying. I poked a finger at the banner of her paper. “America—oggi,” I said.

  I did not realize it till then, but I did not want to leave. Why leave such a place? I couldn’t understand why our friends wouldn’t consider the offers of their secret Italian employers. Was it bad fortune or good that this was still unknown to me at the consular interview where my lie had saved us? It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have dared choose myself over the others in that way, even if ostensibly all this was for me. That was not how it worked in my family.